The Lives of Others (66 page)

‘Babu, let me go, babu,’ she kept pleading. The counterpoint of the birdcall and her unvarying words flashed off a quick irritability; he barked, ‘Shut up!’ The game had changed. Why had she come so far with him if she wanted him to let go of her? It could only be a part of the performance that wily Santhal women put on to make keener the edge of desire.

Her motions and behaviour, which had so far seemed as if taking place under water, suddenly speeded up, the drunkenness dispelled. She tried to twist her arm away, but Somnath now held her with both hands. She shouted out a string of words, presumably about how much he was hurting her, but this was only the first act of the tussle she so wanted. He pushed her against a tree and tried to keep her pinned against it using his whole body, but she kept twisting like a collared cat. It would have been so much better if they were on the ground, but he was now caught between making the most of their standing positions and wanting to bring them both to lie down; the two involved different actions and he tried to find some intersection between them.

A larger rustle rippled through nearby: the presence of humans had clearly alarmed some bigger animal. Holding her against the tree with his waist and legs, he slightly leaned his upper half back and tried to get his hands everywhere, to free her from the cloth wrapping her. She cried out a couple of times in between heavy snorts and panting. A brief thought flitted through Somnath’s mind, that perhaps she was earnest in her resistance, and exited just as quickly, his concentration now wholly on groping and squeezing and subduing. There was a flapping of wings and a shrill
kri-kriii-kri
that ended with a muffled abruptness as if the bird had fallen asleep before finishing its cry. The rustling was getting louder.

Then, shocking Somnath, she bit his hand; sank her teeth in with all the strength she could muster. He cried out and his unaffected hand went up, almost involuntarily, to slap her face, once, twice, three times. This time her screaming emerged unimpeded, with the full force of her lungs. Suddenly the rustling was all around them – they were surrounded by people.

Things moved very fast. A man spoke out some sharp words, the girl ran towards him, wailing; the sound of angry words from the same man, another couple of slaps, then silence from the girl. A torch was shone on Somnath’s face, blinding him. Other men now started speaking. He had no idea how many men there were; at least three. Then the first blow fell before he could think of running away. It hit his side and was swiftly followed by several more, on his legs, back, neck, ribs. He let out a cry and collapsed. The torchlight had gone off. They were beating him with long sticks. A voice rasped out a string of urgent, angry words. Clapped in the stocks of pain and fear, Somnath began to discern Bengali abuse being fired at him – ‘Lowlife! Dog! Son of a sow! You think you can come from the city and do anything you want with our women?’

He curled up, trying to protect his head with his hands and arms, reduced to the fragility of a foetus. Then another set of harsh words that sounded like a command. The torchlight went on and raked him in swinging, jerky arcs. It fell to the ground from the hand of the man who was holding it, its cone of light pendulating a few times before it came to rest. In that ghostly terranean light the men aimed their blows with greater precision. They tried to get to his skull in the way they killed a snake in these parts, by crushing the head with the blows of their sticks, for bringing them down on the body would not do, even if they damaged it and turned it to pulp. They knew that the snake could regrow its body and, once revived, it would come back for revenge, so you had to get the head and beat that into a paste to make sure that you had not just maimed it, but killed it properly.

Later it was said, because Purba did not visibly erupt into the hysterical grief that was expected of a woman widowed two years into her marriage, that she had a heart of stone, but that was only the beginning, and a clement one too, of the weather that was coming.

They tried to keep her from seeing Somnath’s corpse, but only half-heartedly.
An accident in the forests of the Chhotanagpur plateau
, someone had said.
A road accident
, said another. A whisper, quickly suppressed, that Santhals may have been involved in some way, but no one was talking about it, definitely not to her or in front of her; she could not ask anyone, she did not dare ask. How could she? This was not her family, but her lifelong exile among strangers. She saw the room on the ground floor, in which the body had been laid out, thronged with people at all hours, saw the brass vases full of cut stalks of green-tinged white tuberose, its smell mingling with the smoke from the continually burning incense sticks, and felt only the cold clutch of fear.

She took in the clotted black jam that had been his head and tried to turn her face away, but was transfixed by a small line of ants leaving the mess and beginning a march in the opposite direction on the white sheets on which he had been placed. She wondered, sacrilegiously for a time like this, if the ants had been picked up in the forest as he was lying dead in the thick of trees and bushes or if they had come in search now, attracted as they were by rotting organic matter. Then she had thrown up right there and was rushed out of the room; her second great error, a defilement of the sacred room of the dead.

The doctor who had come to write out the death certificate, and give Prafullanath and Charubala a sedative, looked in on her on his way out; she was pregnant with her second child, he said. She had cried then; the doctor had taken it to be for her great misfortune. And yet the tears had not been for her, or for the new child beginning inside her – that was not incarnate yet, only an idea – but for her son who would never know his father. Watching his curly head and his dark, innocent eyes, she felt something like a smashing of everything that was held behind her chest. In a household where she was the youngest adult, who had to defer to the wishes and commands and whims of her seniors, she deferred too on the matter of sorrow and grieving – Somnath’s death was a greater loss to these others.

The little boy, Supratik, whom she had seen prancing up and down, wearing a child’s silk panjabi and a child’s dhoti, when she had got married two years ago, the child who had seemed like the principle of irrepressible energy and was only about seven years younger than she, now slipped into her room and announced sombrely, ‘This is the first death in this house.’ He was only eleven.

Purba lifted up her head. She did not know what to say.

Supratik said, ‘Do you know that story about the Buddha?’

‘No.’

‘A woman’s child died. She was very sad and crying, all the time. She went to the Buddha and said, “Buddha, Buddha, please bring my son back to life.” And she was crying, crying. So the Buddha said to her, “Go bring me some mustard seeds from a house in which there has been no death ever and I’ll bring your son alive.” So the woman went around from house to house, begging for mustard seeds, crying. But she couldn’t find a single house in which there hadn’t been a death. For days she went looking and crying but no one could give her those seeds. So she returned to the Buddha, fell at his feet and said, ‘I couldn’t find the mustard seeds. Every house I went to has had a death in it. What will happen now?’ The Buddha said, ‘I asked you to do the impossible. Every mortal is marked by death. No one can escape it. That is why you couldn’t find a death-free home. This was my lesson to you – death is universal, all of us have to die.’ So the mother, crying, crying, still crying for her dead son, went away. And that is the end of the story.’

She could not bring herself to speak.

The boy let the silence tick for a little while longer, then said to the floor, ‘Don’t be sad’, and left the room.

Several years later she would keep turning the little incident this way and that in the hope of discovering an answer to the question: could this have been the beginning?

The day after Somnath’s cremation at Nimtala Ghat, Prafullanath, who had spent most of his time under sedation since the corpse of his youngest son had been brought back to Calcutta, woke up from the obliteration of his drugged sleep with a strange pain up his right arm. It was not very bad, but neither could it be ignored. He called out to his wife – where was she? – but his throat was too phlegmy for the call to carry. What time was it? There was so much light in the room, he had never known the room to be flooded with so much sunlight. Why had they opened the windows and the door if he had been sleeping? Where was all this light coming from? He got out of bed, felt for his slippers with his feet and managed to kick one under the bed trying to get his feet into them. He bent down to retrieve it. The room canted around him. The light exploded.

After three weeks in PG Hospital, twelve days of which were in the cardiac intensive-care unit, Prafullanath returned home not as himself, but as his beaten shadow. Only one thought, sometimes murmured aloud to himself but overheard gradually by others, kept wheeling and turning in his head: ‘It’s against the order of Nature for a father to mourn the death of his son. What wrong did I commit that I am being punished in this way?’

The efficacy of the sedation was variable. Charubala had sat beside her dead son’s mangled corpse and, dry-eyed, begun to bang her head against a wall, the force of impact increasing with each ramming as she settled into the consolation of a distracting pain. She had to be forcibly removed and restrained in her bed as the doctor gave her an injection. On regaining consciousness she showed no grief; she did not wail, cry, speak – she became instead a stone. If everyone had been horrified by the brutal expression of her sorrow before, now they were even more alarmed. They set about to draw some kind of emotion from those frozen depths. Over days they tried. They cajoled and suggested and tried to make her afraid. News of Purba’s pregnancy could not lance the boil, nor could showing her photographs of Somnath and asking her to choose which one should be blown up, framed and hung on a wall. In one extreme instance Priya tried to describe his brother’s body in gory details and speculate about his final hours, hoping that cruelty would bring about the thaw; his mother remained petrified.

Sandhya suggested that if Purba sat beside her mother-in-law, the sight of her son’s widow might break her heart and release her. Purba, now in her widow’s white, the vermilion line in the parting of her hair permanently removed using the big toe of her husband’s corpse before it was taken away for cremation, complied with her habitual meekness. For unknown reasons, a murky sense of guilt made her want to be overobedient, overbiddable; it was as if she had brought her in-laws to this pass and there was nothing she would not do to atone.

But her mother-in-law, still suspended in the limbo of her shock, read these murky, unplumbed deeps of Purba’s soul with ease. On the third day of Purba sitting at her vigil, Charubala surfaced from wherever she had been drowned and uttered her first words. She looked at Purba and said, ‘You have brought this great misery upon our heads. You are ill-starred, evil.’

The effect of her resurgence momentarily shrouded the meaning of her words. Chhaya shrieked, ‘Ma’s speaking! Ma’s speaking!’ and ran up and down the stairs summoning everyone. In that room, now full of people, Charubala arraigned her youngest daughter-in-law. ‘You have brought this misfortune to our house,’ she repeated. ‘You’re a burnt-faced woman, it is because of you that my son died.’

Sandhya tried to interrupt, ‘Ma, please, this is not . . .’ but the words shrivelled and died in her mouth. A great pall had fallen over the house. The silence in the room was that of unspeakability. A magic circle had been drawn around Purba; locked inside it, she instilled fear in everyone outside that malignant aura of the cursed one. Superstition did the rest. Purba found herself to be the weak animal that the rest of its own kind attacked and drove outside the fold.

From this point the culture of strictures governing widowhood will settle on Purba’s life like the clanging shut of the immensely heavy metal lid over a manhole. She will eat only strictly vegetarian food, all manner of protein forbidden in case it inflames her blood, leading her to any kind of impropriety in her thoughts and actions. She will observe strict fasts every eleventh day after the full moon. In a previous generation they would have had her head shaved and made her wear a piece of coarse, white, handspun cotton cloth that reached only down to the top of her ankles, but some grudging acknowledgement had to be made to social progress. On the excuse of some long-overdue rearrangements in domestic space, Purba and her two children will be asked in a year’s time to move from the first floor, which she had shared, when her husband had been alive, with Priya, Purnima and Baishakhi, to the ground floor of the house.

The apportioning of space and the layout of rooms on this floor followed a pattern different from the architectural interior regularity of the other floors. It was a mess: a sitting room that was never used; a kitchen with an adjoining enclosure for washing-up and cutting fish and meat; a room at the back that could have been a bedroom, but had been used as a pantry and storeroom from the early days of the building’s history; a couple of dingy rooms, their space eaten into by the need to accommodate, a few steps down, the garages and the entrance. In one of these rooms Purba will be asked to make her quarters with her son and daughter. Her exile will begin to take on its physical lineaments.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1970

HE SCINTILLATES WITH
the glamour of terror. Or so it seems to him. Only now, a month after his return, do the children of the house, his cousins, bring themselves to talk to him; initially, during the first weeks, it would be a lightning peep from the corner or behind doors, then a quick scampering off if he caught them at it. Sometimes he called out – ‘Ei, Arunima, come in, come inside’ – but she was gone, too frightened to think of him as her eldest cousin. What have the children been told? Supratik wonders. There is so much unsaid that he feels the air shimmer. Everyone avoids his eye; when they think he is looking elsewhere, he catches them stealing quick glances at him; the Ghoshes’ very own resident cicatrice. He is beyond indifferent.